#the final of the five

LAMBSTOWN CHARACTERS, zion aldridge.

it’s an every-meal sort of thing.  that is to say, there’s only two and a half restaurants in town; two that are always accessible to underage and one that turns adults only when the sun goes down.  thus, two and a half.  a diner joint, a half fancy place that uses low lighting and the smell of spicy candles to make everything just a shade more fitting, and the bar-not-bar.  sliding in and out of each of them is easy as pie for billie, but the diner gets her attention more than anyone else.  not a matter of price.  it’s a matter of waitstaff.  

where else can she find someone like zion on such raw display?  the mask that he wears is profound beyond anything, simplistically shaped to entertain the masses of their nowhere and nothing town who in return, barely tolerate the kid.  watching the evolution – what zion can’t hide with a fake bubbly personality and bright smile – with wide and wary eyes.  it’s chaos to them.  but it’s art to billie.  

when zion still went to school, alone for so long in every classroom, there was an aura of falsehood in the kid’s existence.  well cultured but grating beneath any attention, every passing day.  back then, zion still had hair.  loose and brittle from a lack of care falling down past shoulders and the swell underneath the front of loose shirts.  

back then, zion was a she with no question or hesitation in anyone’s minds.  there she goes wearing a name that doesn’t suit her, there she is staring at nothing again.  look at her, picking up garter snakes from the desert ground and carrying them as living knots around her fingers until the teachers make her release them into the sand again.  

now a lot of them aren’t sure.  things changed quickly for zion after graduation, as dismissive and dismal of a thing as it was.  first a head was stripped of hair and kept that way, bare, reflecting the sunlight.  then the ink appeared.  not cheap and poorly done; instead an elegant brutalist sort of pattern that made no sense to anyone.  poor taste, they called it.  that’s the thing killing zion’s poor mother, frail thing that she is.  

every job offer came out of pity.  almost every person clucked in distaste as zion lashed down her, their, his chest until every shirt hung even looser on that body.  what would happen, billie wondered, when sickness finally took zion’s mother away?  would all those jobs be suddenly filled?  the barely there kindness, would that dry up too?  towns like these weren’t made for odd silhouettes wearing snakes like bracelets and haunted, gaunt expressions when no one is supposed to be looking.

she knows it’s not a question of anything but how long.  and just who zion will be when the world collapses around him.  

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